I sometimes find it hard to believe that Steven
Pinker really believes what he believes; surely, I think, some occult agency in
his mind is forcing his conscious intellect to accept premises and conclusions
that it ought to reject as utterly fantastic. I suppose, though, that that is
one’s normal reaction to ardent expressions of a faith one does not share; at
its worst, it is just a reflex of supercilious fastidiousness, like feeling only
an annoyed consternation at having to step over someone in the throes of
mystical ecstasy in order to retrieve an umbrella from the closet. A healthier
sentiment would be generous and patient curiosity, a desire to learn whether the
believer has in fact—guided by a rare purity of heart—glimpsed truths to which
one’s own cynicism or coarseness has blinded one.

Not, of course, that
Pinker would care for that way of putting the matter. He detests religion and
thinks of himself as a champion of something he blandly calls “reason” (that is
the most enchantingly guileless aspect of his creed). In his latest book,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he devotes
over seven hundred pages to arguing the case that modernity, contrary to the
common impression, has seen a steep decrease in every kind of violence—domestic,
political, criminal, and martial—as a result of a variety of causes, but
principally because of the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideas. It is a simple
narrative, and at many points a painfully simplistic one, but it is clear and
bracing and merits sympathetic consideration.

Whether Pinker himself does
the tale justice, however, is debatable. He is definitely not an adept
historian; his view of the past—particularly of the Middle Ages, which he tends
to treat as a single historical, geographical, and cultural moment—is often not
merely crude, but almost cartoonish (of course, he is a professed admirer of
Norbert Elias). He even adduces two edited images from Das Mittelalterliche
Hausbuch as illustrations of “the everyday texture of life in medieval
Europe,” without noting that they come from a set of astrological allegories
about planetary influences, from which he has chosen those for Saturn and Mars
rather than, say, Venus and Jupiter. (Think what a collection of Saturnine or
Martial pictures he might have gathered from more recent history.)

It is
perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal features of much
of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if he
acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved
despite its material privations. He says nothing of almshouses, free hospitals,
municipal physicians, hospices, the decline of chattel slavery, the Pax
Dei and Treuga Dei, and so on. Of the more admirable cultural,
intellectual, legal, spiritual, scientific, and social movements of the High
Middle Ages, he appears to know nothing. And his understanding of early
modernity is little better. His vague remarks on the long-misnamed “Wars of
Religion” are tantalizing intimations of a fairly large
ignorance.

Perhaps such complaints miss the point, though. Pinker’s is a
story not of continuous moral evolution, but of an irruptive redemptive event.
It would not serve his purpose to admit that, in addition to the gradual
development of the material conditions that led to modernity, there might also
have been the persistent pressure of moral ideas and values that reached back to
antique or medieval sources, or that there might have been occasional
institutional adumbrations of modern “progress” in the Middle Ages, albeit in a
religious guise.

He certainly would not want to grant that many of his
own moral beliefs are inherited contingencies of a long cultural history rather
than discoveries recently made by the application of disinterested “reason.” For
him, modern culture’s moral advances were born from the sudden and fortuitous
advent of the “Age of Reason,” which—aided by the printing press—produced a
“coherent philosophy” called “Enlightenment humanism,” distilled from the ideas
of “Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria,
Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill.”
We know what he means: not the dark side of the “Enlightenment” and the printing
press—“scientific racism,” state absolutism, Jacobinism, the rise of murderous
ideologies, and so on—but the nice Enlightenment of “perpetual peace,”
the “rights of man,” and so on.

Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I
suppose. It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more “enlightened” or
“rational” than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to prove the
point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his
book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction.

That is
to say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced certain kinds of brutality,
cruelty, and injustice. Modern technology makes it far easier to control crime.
We have weapons both too terrifying to use in open combat and so precise that we
can kill at great distances, without great armies, out of sight and mind. We
have succeeded at reforming our own nations internally in ways that make them
ever more comfortable, less threatening, and more complacent. Our prison system
is barbaric, but not overtly sadistic, and our more draconian laws rarely
inconvenience the affluent among us. We have learned to exploit the labor and
resources of poorer peoples not by enslaving them, but merely by making them
“beneficiaries” of globalization. The violence we commit is more hygienic,
subtler, and less inconvenient than that committed by our forebears.

Even
so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative
ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not
as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But
statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample
sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the
smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously,
though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in
a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates
one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not
quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since
over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically
extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far
more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person
would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than
now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline
of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual
and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more
exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So
what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or
“Enlightenment”—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means,
praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the
mythology.

And yet, oddly enough, I like Pinker’s book. On one level,
perhaps, it is all terrific nonsense: historically superficial, philosophically
platitudinous, occasionally threatening to degenerate into the dulcet bleating
of a contented bourgeois. But there is also something exhilarating about this
fideist who thinks he is a rationalist. Over the past few decades, so much of
secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment,
spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of
failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all
“metanarrative” ambitions.

Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more
hopeful commitment to the “Enlightenment”—and I would not wake him from his
dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the
ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt. For me, it reaffirms
the human spirit’s lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood,
not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.

3 comments:

'He is definitely not an adept historian; his view of the past—particularly of the Middle Ages, which he tends to treat as a single historical, geographical, and cultural moment—is often not merely crude, but almost cartoonish (of course, he is a professed admirer of Norbert Elias).'